Immersion and invariance control for lateral dynamics of autonomous vehicles, with experimental validation

Autonomous intelligent vehicles are under intensive development, especially this last decade. The autonomous navigation consists on developing three main key steps: 1. environment perception, 2. path planning and decision, and 3. vehicle control. This paper focus on the lateral control of intelligent vehicles ; it presents design and experimental validation of a vehicle lateral controller based on Immersion and Invariance (I&I) principle, to minimize the lateral displacement of the autonomous vehicle with respect to a given reference trajectory. The control input is the steering angle and the output is the lateral error displacement. The closed-loop system simulated on Matlab-Simulink has been compared to the experimental data acquired on our vehicle DYNA, a Peugeot 308, according to several driving scenarios. The experimental validation shows robustness and good performance of the proposed control approach.